),
we first see Jericho sat alone in his apartment ready to blow his brains out,
but a disturbance puts him off sending his brains west for the day.
What follows doesn't make the greatest amount of sense, but it's a great
rollercoaster ride that's definitely deserving of your attention, apart
from Rod Steiger's brief performance as Father Kovak with an accent
from god-knows-where...
The film is presented in the original 2.35:1 cinematic ratio and is anamorphic,
with no artifacts and a superb-looking picture. What's also great is that
there's scores of dark scenes which could sound the death knell for the
smooth error-free pictures but the encoding handles them perfectly.
The average bitrate is 5.57Mb/s, occasionally peaking over 8Mb/s.
The sound blisters out of the speakers with one explosive scene after another,
or some that simply resort to gunfire to get the message across. Occasionally
there's a quiet scene, but it's not what Arnie's best known for.
Extras :
Chapters :
19 chapters to the film and it could use more. Why do Buena Vista DVDs only
get a few chapters while Warner's get 30 or more usually?
Languages and Subtitles :
English and Germany in Dolby Digital 5.1 for dialogue. Subtitles are available in the same
languages, the English variant being for the hard of hearing too.
And there's more... :
First off is the American Trailer and then Spotlight on Location, a 25-minute
made-for-TV featurette with no surprises. It mixes chat from everyone with many clips from
the film. It's good to watch once, but that's about it.
The Special Effects concentrates on 9 scenes from the film such as The Train,
The Creature, The Shattering Albino and Sex with Satan (oo-er, missus!), each of
which last anything between two and nine minutes long. After each, the disc then attempts
to show the scene as it looked in the finished version, but this doesn't always seem to work.
There's also something called Soundtrack Presentation, but it's just a trailer
for the soundtrack album, although the label makes it sound like they include the full thing
on here which would've been nice. The soundtrack includes all your granny's favourites
like Eminem, Limp Bizkit, Korn and this is followed by two music videos
from Rob Zombie and Everlast.
Menu :
Static and silent with a shot of Arnie and Gabriel and the standard options.
Overall, this film deserves a much better hearing than it received from most
of the world's press who must've got together on purpose to criticise it.
I don't know of anyone who had a good word to say about it, apart from those
with a brain, so put all the magazines aside and think for yourself.
End of Days marks Arnie's first film in two years since
Batman & Robin,
the delay partly being caused by his operation to replace his aortic valve in
his heart (hey, me too!)
This DVD has also got all the features of the Region 1 version, so you have
no excuse but to bow down and appease Satan by shelling out twenty nicker.
DVDs reviewed by the editor are watched on a Panasonic TXW32R4 32" widescreen TV
connected to either a Creative Dxr2 DVD-ROM player or Microsoft Xbox and
played through a Sony STR-DB930 amplifier.
PC games reviewed by the editor are on:
Since Nov 2005: Intel Pentium D 830 3.0Ghz, 1Gb RAM, 128Mb nVidia GeForce 6700XL, Windows XP
Since Aug 2003: Intel Pentium 4 2.66Ghz, 512Mb RAM, 128Mb GeForce4 MX440 graphics, Windows XP
Since May 2003: Intel Pentium 4 2.6Ghz, 512Mb RAM, 128Mb ATI Radeon 9600TX graphics, Windows XP
Since Jun 2002: Intel Pentium III 600Mhz, 384Mb RAM, Windows 98 SE, 64Mb ATI Radeon 8500LE
Since May 2000: Intel Pentium III 600Mhz, 384Mb RAM, Windows 98 SE, Voodoo 3 3000 AGP
